No, not end of discussion. I'm tired of stupid kids running their mouths. An educated public is key to not ruining our planet.
FYI: i don't get my information from Fox News, I get it from my professors at the Ivy League college i happen to attend. I'm also an environmental studies major....bitch.
So, in response to all you fuckheads, here's the introductory section to a research paper I just finished (finals almost done, then i go to Colorado, sick!) on global carbon markets.
This should end the argument. If you don't believe i wrote this, google it. then punch yourself in the face.....
The world we inhabit is one today defined by scarcity. Centuries ago, the ends of the earth were unknown, and civilizations existed in complete ignorance of one another. Given this assumption of a seemingly boundless global environment, its ability to provide material and space was thought to be limitless. Time, delineated by history, proved the reality to be otherwise, and the debate rages over how best to utilize and manage that which we cannot get enough of and simultaneously do not have enough of: energy from the earth. The actors central to this debate are, principally, proponents of maximizing the benefits an unrestrained market economy provides and advocates for conservation and alternative energy sources. While the global outlook of an environmentalist may lie opposite that of an economist with regard to humankind’s utilization of natural resources, their perspectives certainly intersect in agreement on one fact: anthropogenic activity is defined by the consumption of fossil fuels.
In a more sophisticated instance of “biting the hand that feeds”, the carbon dioxide produced by our fossil fuel addiction threatens the natural function of the environmental systems we rely on in so many ways. Excess CO2 in the atmosphere intensifies its heat-trapping function known as the greenhouse effect. It is by way of this unnatural mechanism that we experience global warming. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations prior to the Industrial Revolution were principally the result of natural processes and were influenced irrelevantly by human activities. The explosive development of an industrialized world economy in the 19th century changed the planet forever. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, reliance on fossil fuels skyrocketed, and measures of carbon in our atmosphere responded accordingly. In 1958, a scientist named Charles David Keeling began a study involving the continuous measurement of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. He obtained an initial reading of 315 parts per million (ppm), up from pre-industrial levels of 275 ppm found in polar ice cores – by the year 2000, the Keeling Curve revealed an atmospheric carbon concentration of 367 ppm .
The following year, in 2001, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-backed gathering of representatives from the government, scientific, and NGO communities, established a direct link between ecological symptoms of global warming and human activity, and issued a warning for worsening conditions in the future . While this was of course not the first “official” response to the reality of Keeling’s data, the direction and source of this assertion reflected a collective awareness of responsibility and consequence that while heartening unfortunately came into fruition not until the new millennium. More recently, this month the IPCC’s Working Group I released its contribution to the panel’s “Fourth Assessment Report”; building on its previous relation of climate change to anthropogenic pursuits, it further specifies the reality of a grim present and future, citing “changes in Artic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts…heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones” . As attentiveness in government circles has grown, there has – with the expectedly lag time, however slight - developed a more enthusiastic and more aware public entity. This is the collective result of many things, including highly visible “green” marketing by corporate actors, the ubiquity of climate change issues in the media, and truly first-of-their-kind efforts like Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. All of these factors combined have pushed global warming to the front of the popular stage. As will be further explored later in this paper, this involvement – and mobilization – of the informed public individual is fundamentally crucial to the success of programs fighting climate change.
But the IPCC reports did not constitute a groundbreaking call to action, as many attempts at addressing the problem of global warming – often called “fixes” – preceded their release. These efforts, appearing en force first in the late 1980s, were mostly comprised of attempts to stimulate and organize support for the development of fixes, as opposed to concrete action to reduce or offset carbon emissions. In 1989, the Union of Concerned Scientists received 700 signatures – many from Nobel Laureates and National Academy of Sciences members – on their petition “urging recognition of global warming as potentially the greatest danger to mankind” . The UCS petition, while essentially only documenting environmental consciousness, was significant as epitomizing the many prequels to the more formally recognized IPCC reports. Eventually, however, advocacy developed into action, and global actors began work on ways of truly impacting climate change. The most prominent approach in more recent decades has been via international regulations achieved through geopolitical discourse.
The most famous of these is the Kyoto Protocol.
Now, go learn about the Kyoto Protocol, THEN weigh in on the present situation/debate.
Case closed. Class is dismissed.
